skip to content
 

2024-25 is the twentieth anniversary year of the founding of the Centre for Intellectual Property (CIPIL) which is an auspicious moment to take stock of the themes and projects pursued and to celebrate and take sustenance from CIPIL's achievements to date.

Evolving from the "IP Unit" which Bill Cornish had led in the Centre of European Legal Studies, CIPIL was founded in October 2004 to coincide with the arrival in Cambridge of Bill's successor, Lionel Bently. Professor Bently was sole Director during CIPIL's first decade, guiding it through its formative years and into maturity, and has remained a leading figure in its development since. Now co-directed by David Erdos and Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan, in essence, the Centre is a community of scholars – academics, post-docs, and PhDs – who work in the areas of intellectual property (IP) and information law (IL). CIPIL works as a supportive environment in which research ideas can be generated and honed, joint projects developed, research-outputs discussed and presented, as well as a vehicle through which individual members can interact with other scholars (including affiliates, associates and visitors), judges and policy makers. The Centre also supports the teaching of subjects related to IP, information and technology law in the Faculty.

Over its first 20 years, historical and comparative analysis of the development of both IP and information law has constituted a particular area of focus, as has an analysis of the responsibilities of different actors within these ecosystems including, of course, the plethora of new intermediaries and platforms. Unsurprisingly, CIPIL scholarship has often focused on the principal sub-fields of IP, namely, copyright, designs, patents and trade marks in their domestic, European and international dimensions. Nevertheless, the development of information law within the common law has been explored within CIPIL from its earliest days and over the past decade a substantial body of CIPIL's work has also examined statutory data protection and electronic privacy.

In 2015, former Deputy Director, Kathy Liddell became the director of a further research hub, the Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences (LML), which itself secured substantial research grant funding. Since its inception LML has been a close collaborator with CIPIL. Especially with the addition of Mateo Aboy and Jeff Skopek, CIPIL and LML continue to lead in the field of bio-innovation law, and have developed highly innovative and interdisciplinary methodologies for assessing patent protection, making Cambridge the global leader for empirical patent research.

Individual work

Reflecting the culture of Cambridge's Faculty of Law more generally, CIPIL has primarily sought to be an enabler of the individual work of its members. A great deal of excellent scholarship has been forthcoming, notably:

Policy and impact

CIPIL members have, individually and collectively, frequently sought to use their research skills and insights to support policy makers . In its first decade, with the benefit of economic work by Rufus Pollock, CIPIL contributed to two HM Treasury reports, one with a paper on copyright term extension for the Gowers' Review, and the other concerning the exploitation of data generated by trading funds. Later, with the benefit of AHRC funding, post-doc Richard Danbury produced important papers on news and its relation to copyright, papers that were used widely in the European Union's debates over a press publishers right. David Erdos was instrumental in ensuring that academic expression was protected as a special form of freedom of expression alongside journalism within the GDPR (and now also the UK GDPR) and has contributed multiple pieces of evidence on how data protection should be formulated and enforced both in the EU and the UK, including in contexts that engage freedom of expression. Christina Angelopoulos completed a European Commission study exploring access to and reuse of scientific publications in the context of EU copyright law and related rights, as well as a study for Julia Reda MP on what ultimately became the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market 2019/790. Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan has been instrumental in designing and delivering training for FCDO and other UK government departments on international IP law and policy since 2018, primarily to provide expert level knowledge-transfer on IP commitments in Free Trade Agreements the UK has been negotiating post-Brexit, how those commitments fit within the international IP framework, and can align with domestic UK interests. One of his PhD students, Alex Ferguson, completed a PhD on trade secrets and international investment law before then joining the FCDO. Research by Mateo Aboy, Kathy Liddell and John Liddicoat has also had significant policy impact. Their work has been widely cited by organizations including the United States Patent & Trademark Office and the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, with their Nature Biotechnology papers on Myriad, Mayo, and Alice featuring prominently in the 2022 USPTO Report to Congress on 'Patent Eligible Subject Matter-Current Jurisprudence in the United States'. Kathy's earlier work with the Academy of Medical Sciences also influenced the use of health records in medical research, and Dr John Liddicoat has advised universities, hospitals, and governments on strategies to obtain exclusivities in the process of regulatory authorisations for patient treatments.

PhDs and post-docs

Over the twenty years, the CIPIL community has also benefited from a series of wonderful and hugely able PhD students and post-docs. PhD topics have included the protection of the steel pan in Trinidad, copyright issues surrounding video-game 'mods', an exploration of the inventive concept in patent law, moral rights and theories of personality, exceptions and limitations in copyright, territoriality and arbitration of IP rights, data-sharing in the public sector, the public-private divide in information law and the concepualisation of reputation within the information torts. Sean Bottomley won the Economic History Prize and Selden Society prize for his wonderful work on The British Patent System during the Industrial Revolution 1700–1852, while Elena Cooper won the Yorke prize for her thesis which led to her Art and Modern Copyright monograph. Most of our doctoral students have gone on to academic posts: Isabella Alexander, whose PhD was published as Copyright Law and the Public Interest in the Nineteenth Century, is a professor in Sydney (UTS); Julia Powles is director of the UWA Tech & Policy Lab and an associate professor at University of Western Australia; David Simon is an associate professor in Northeastern University; Yin Harn Lee is a senior lecturer at Bristol; Patrick Masiyakurima, whose thesis was published as Copyright Protection of Unpublished Works in the Common Law World, is a senior lecturer at City University; Oliver Butler is an assistant professor at Nottingham, and Maxence Rivoire and James Parish are both lecturers at KCL, while Elena Cooper is a senior research fellow at Glasgow and Ann-Kristin Glenster is with the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy in Cambridge. Our post-docs have been equally successful: Eleonora Rosati (LLM and later post-doc) is now a professor at Stockholm University, Joanna Kostylo (an expert in Venetian Studies) is now at Jagiellonian University, Richard Danbury directs the MA in Investigative Journalism at City University, John Liddicoat is a senior lecturer in intellectual property law at KCL, whilst Krzysztof Garstka is a senior research analyst at Trilateral Research, Patricia Akester is a practitioner in Lisbon and Laura Biron a Vicar at Holy Trinity Headington Quarry.

Teaching

Students are never far from the thinking of CIPIL members, with members Jennifer Davis and Lionel Bently, and formerly Bill Cornish and Catherine Seville, all co-authoring standard IP student texts. CIPIL has provided the framework for developing the general IP undergraduate and LLM courses at Cambridge and for furthering new IP and IL teaching within the Faculty. In 2004, to coincide with CIPIL's launch, we established an International Intellectual Property Law course on the LLM. Initially taught by visiting Goodhart professor Jane Ginsburg alongside CIPIL faculty, Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan took over the reins in 2014, extending the popular course so as to focus on the intersection of international IP law with other international legal regimes, such as trade, investment, human rights, and public health. In the same year, David Erdos established the LLM course in Law and Information and the Tripos half-paper in Personal Information Law (now Personal Data Protection Law). The following year, 2015, Jeff Skopek and Kathy Liddell introduced 'Law, Medicine and Life Sciences', which includes modules on innovation and confidentiality. In 2023, Jennifer Cobbe and Simon Deakin set up a new Law, Technology and Society Paper, to which Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan also contributes, in addition to teaching on the LLM Law and Policy of the WTO and Free Trade Agreements course. The Centre has also supported the mooting activities of students in the field of IP and IL, with the IP team making the final of the Oxford IP moot in 2018 and a media law team coached by David Erdos winning the Price Law Moot European Competition in 2024.

Conferences and events

2018 Spring Conference Networking

CIPIL has also sought to serve the IP and IL community in Cambridge and beyond by pursuing a range of common endeavours including conferences and events. Our annual Spring Conference , which began in 2006 with an exploration of personality rights, has been a particular highlight with each year's iteration seeking to bring both academics and practitioners together to explore a topical issue which has been as varied as unfair competition (2009), intellectual property and private international law (2011) and is IP good for our health? (2020). Our last but one spring conference in 2023 explored the impact of Professor Bill Cornish, the inaugural Herchel Smith Chair in IP, who provided CIPIL with sage guidance right up until his sad passing in January 2022.

Alongside the Spring Conference, CIPIL has also supported the International Intellectual Property Lecture which has been delivered annually at Emmanual College since 2006 by many of the world's leading IP academics including, most recently, Oren Bracha, Jeannie Fromer, Arti K. Rai and Ansgar Ohly. CIPIL has also consistently run a regular research seminar, often organised by doctoral students and during the past few years by Jennifer Davis, with the recordings of talks from 2011-12 onwards generally being made available online. In 2022, CIPIL hosted and co-sponsored the European Policy for Intellectual Property (EPIP) Annual Conference alongside Cambridge's Innovation and IP Management Laboratory under the leadership of Frank Tietze. The following year, CIPIL co-sponsored a conference on Private Law and Intellectual Property convened by Poorna Mysoor.

Academic visitors

In addition, CIPIL and its individual members have supported external scholars working within IP and IL to come and spend some time at the Faculty of Law as academic visitors. A particular highlight has been the setting up of the Herchel Smith Visiting Fellowship which has enabled leading academics within IL and IP (such as Bernt Hugenholtz, Kathy Bowrey, Annette Kur, Graham Greenleaf, Herbert Zech, and most recently Ruth Okediji from Harvard) to come to University for around a month on a funded basis. As well as deepening connections within IP and IL, these visitors have enriched our community both informally and, very often, more formally through delivering seminars or other presentations within our events programme.

 

Digital resources

Alongside events and visitors, CIPIL has also sought to create digital resources which will be of value to research and to the IP and IL community more generally. This strand of work began with a joint Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) research project entitled primary sources of copyright from 1450-1900, in which five post-docs were asked to select the most important documents relating to the history of copyright in five jurisdictions, writing commentaries explaining the importance of the documents to accompany digital images, transliterations and translations. The project continues, and now covers twelve jurisdictions, with 720 documents and over 300,000 unique page views. Subsequently, CIPIL developed a virtual museum of materials which have been at the heart of copyright cases in the twentieth century and also collated the travaux préparatoires or working papers of all of the major early EU instruments in both IP and IL. More recently, we have amassed a database of the English language texts of both historic and contemporary data protection laws from across the European Economic Area (EEA), Switzerland and the UK, reports on the data protection's historic and current interaction with freedom of expression and information in all these States and also collated the EU Article 29 Data Protection (A29) Working Party's documentation from 1997 to 2018.

Legacies and debts

A Centre that lasts for 20 years will inevitably have to confront the frailty of human life. CIPIL continues to both cherish and draw on the legacy of Bill Cornish, the pioneer of IP as an academic field in the UK academy. In 2024, we were delighted that the Bill Cornish Memorial Scholarship was awarded to its first recipient. We remember the contribution to the Centre, particularly as a much-loved teacher, of Catherine Seville, author of the Yorke-prize winning monograph The Internationalisation of Copyright Law: Books, Buccaneers and the Black Flag in the Nineteenth Century (2006). We also continue to miss Mrs. Gaenor Moore, who served two periods as the Centre's warm-hearted administrator before her premature death in 2022. Over the same period the Centre has also incurred numerous debts: to its administrators (Ann Smith, Anne Philips, Gaenor Moore, Carol Hosmer, Sophie Eastwood, Claire Hill, James Parish and latterly Felicity Eves-Rey); to its directors and deputy directors and members; to all our visiting scholars; to all those who have given their time to come and give seminars and talks; to those who have helped with support of the moot teams (including coaches Isabella Alexander, Yin Harn Lee, Laura Hannan, Quentin Schaefer; and all the mock judges, particularly those from 11 South Square); to all the supervisors of IP, especially the "external supervisors" (Chris Stothers, Kathryn Pickard, Anna Caddick, Richard Hacon, Lucy Harrold, Denise McFarland, Simon Thorley KC, David Ivison, Hannah Williams, Mark Elmslie, Thomas Hood, Jocelyn Bosse); and, of course, to all those who have supported projects and events financially (including Herchel Smith Fund, Emmanuel College, the AHRC, the ESRC, CREATe, MLaw, Herbert Smith, and Schillings).

Looking forward

Not only CIPIL's individual scholarship but also our wider work very much continues in our anniversary year. During the 2024-25 academic year, our Spring Conference will focus on how AI is likely to change IP and we are also collaborating in a conference to be held at City University on IP Remedies over the past 50 years. Watch this space!